nearly 6 a.m. and downstairs the TSG Tannoy blurted commands through the building. No one would come into the incident room for another two hours. Caffery was watching the video again, aimlessly doodling on a scrap of headed Met notepaper. The woman weighed he'd squinted and tried to guess when he first saw her enter the frame maybe fifteen, sixteen stone? She had a flat boxer's nose, flaky skin, dark glossy hair and was dressed in a black camisole and satin mules. The boy glanced up occasionally at the camera, as if to say, 'Am I doing it right?' and the brunette made obscene little moues as she lightly scratched the inside of his thigh with her scarlet and black nail designs. At the beginning of the tape she came into the room and sat on the sofa, and for a moment she passed close enough to the camera for a tattoo on the top of her arm to come into focus: a heart behind prison bars. Caffery absently scratched the image into the doodle.
It wasn't just the woman's appearance and the slack, rather blank way she was abusing the child on the sofa that had struck him: it was the astonishing carelessness with her identity. Maybe because these tapes were intended to be edited a surprising number of them revealed clues about the abuser ordinarily any adult taking part in a film like this would be at pains to keep their face hidden. Identifying peculiarities would be covered, sheets hung over bookcases, labels cut out of any clothes the children wore most pictures that made it to the internet had identifying features airbmshed out with graphics software. Not so in these tapes. He got glimpses of faces, records, CD titles of this tattoo. In three of the videos he could actually hear muttered conversations off-camera, men speaking, commenting on the action, muttering about what they could do to the child on screen. Caffery could even hear names in the conversations: Stoney, Rollo, Yatesy. He carefully noted down everything.
There was no audio on the tapes of the brunette, but in this one there were plenty of visual clues to work with. Behind the peeling, fake-leather sofa was a veneer display cabinet, lighted from above, and he could see decorative glasses, a pile of duty-free Silk Cut boxes, a photograph in a gold frame. But more importantly, and more unbelievably, there was a single, blatant identifier in the earliest part of the tape. Caffery paused the tape and rewound. Played. The woman stood and crossed the room. He rewound. She crossed the room backwards, sinking on to the sofa and crossing her legs. Stop. Play. She uncrossed her legs, stood and crossed the room. Stop. Rewind. Back to the sofa. Stop. Play. Back and forward. Eventually he froze the tape where he wanted it.
As she crossed the room she passed, briefly, a window. The swish glide curtains were slightly open, and although it could only have been ten frames or so, less than half a second, Caffery had glimpsed a distinctive yellow flare. He leaned forward now, staring intently at the screen, and put the ageing VCR on to frame-by-frame, letting the brunette move jerkily forward until the yellow was clear. He paused the tape. He tore the top sheet of paper from the pad and found a pen. His pulse was racing. Now that the tape had stopped he could see exactly what that yellow splash was. Outside the window of the room someone had parked a car. For two frames the number-plate, although at an angle, was legible. He scribbled the number down and went into the incident room.
The PNC2 computer could fit a name to an index number in seconds. By 6.05 a.m. he knew who owned the car, and Phoenix, PNC2's newly attached database, had told him a lot about the owner. Things were starting to make sense. He pushed his chair away from the terminal, rolled it across the incident room to the tray marked 'Receiver In' next to Kryotos's workstation, and picked up the sheaf of returned Actions forms for Kryotos to type into HOLMES. He wanted to know if during the day the paedophile unit had detailed any of the team to speak to one Carl Lamb of Thetford, Norfolk.
Nineteen.
(24 July)
The hallway was quiet. Not silent: on the landing the electric security timer trundled through its increments, but otherwise the hall was quiet. Not a creak of board or a shift of air. At 6.30 a.m. the timer clicked through and the lamp on the landing switched off. Builders' sand had been trodden into the stair carpet and someone had been spray-painting on the walls. Visible from the hallway were the letters HAZA-painted in red. To anyone mounting the stairs the final letters were visible at the bend in the staircase, across the front of the spare bedroom door: RP The entire graffiti read -HAZARD Next to it was the cross and circle symbol representing the female.
Caffery left Shrivemoor before anyone arrived and took all of Penderecki's tapes home. The black Beetle with the lime interior wasn't outside, and when he checked in all the rooms he found himself almost disappointed to see that Rebecca hadn't defied him and wasn't sitting up in his bed smoking a cigarillo. The sheets had been changed, she had washed the old ones and left them in the dryer. Apart from that she had left almost no sign of herself. 'That's what you asked for,' he murmured, 'and that's what you got.'
He wrapped the videos in two plastic bags, secured them with tape, pushed them to the darkest corner under the stairs, and locked the door. He showered, slept a deep, jetlaggy sleep for two hours on the sofa, the bedroom smelt of Rebecca and just before 10 a.m. drank coffee and got into the car. It was a hot day he wore a short- sleeved shirt and shades and kept the window open. He knew he looked like a gubernatorial security guard in a southern state, Texas maybe.
Carl Lamb had died within the last month. Judging by his criminal and prison record his death had left the world a safer place, but one thing the authorities had never picked up about him was that he had been a nonce. There was no intelligence linking him to Penderecki, and his criminal record had been for breaking and entering, GBH, ABH, aggravated vehicle theft and a string of credit-card frauds. But when Caffery checked where and when he'd done time he discovered that he'd been in Ashworth at the same time as Penderecki. The stray ends were beginning to come together. Penderecki had meant Caffery to take this journey.
There was a sister still alive, Tracey Lamb, aged forty-two. She had a minor criminal record, had done little bits of time here and there. Caffery wondered, as he drove through Suffolk, through quiet villages coiled with climbing roses, past white weather-boarded dovecotes, cakes of salt lick glittering in the sun, he wondered if Tracey Lamb had a tattoo on her right arm.
The roads grew emptier as he reached the poorer end of Suffolk, the north, where it bled into Norfolk. Here the population lived in isolated farmhouses or in crumbling ribbon developments, and the only signs that he wasn't alone on this planet were burnt-out cars on the verges and the occasional ghost filling station with rusted petrol pumps on weed-covered fore courts This was Iceni territory, blood and isolation in the air, as if Boudicca herself was shadowing him through her land. You could do anything out here and no one would know.
Rebecca's face came to him once, but it was OK, he found he could push her away. He could push her out on either side, out into the slipstream of the Jag, and off into the fields that stretched away from the car into the shimmer of midday.
He almost missed the turning in the trees. It was on a deserted, heat-cracked road, marked by a rusting sign, '4x4 tyres' hanging from a post. He had to brake and reverse up, then swing the Jag into the grassed-over drive. The ground was rutted, and tangled trees on either side created a natural alley. He was aware of things squatting out in the nettles: piles of breeze-blocks, old abandoned caravans and chassis, a rusted shipping container as tall as a man standing up straight in the trees. After a hundred yards or so he stopped the car safer to continue on foot, safer to let the grass muffle his footsteps and climbed out. He was immediately struck by the quiet: the only sound was the distant mosquito whine of a jet from Honnington R.A.F base.
Another hundred yards on and he found himself at the edge of a clearing shielded from the rest of Norfolk by a ring of towering sycamores. Nothing moved. On his right stood a corrugated iron hangar, the words 'Sports Cars' in chipped paint on the lintel, the doors open to reveal the decomposing remains of a business of sorts a crumbling engine hoist, rusting Elf oil cans and a pile of Land-rover roofs. Beyond the hangar, across weed-blistered tarmac, he could see the pebble-dashed walls of a house, square like a nuclear bunker, nettles growing up to the windows. And now that he listened he realized that somewhere a TV was playing. He took a few steps forward and saw, parked against the house -Jesus fucking Christ the Fiat from the video. A sheet of chicken wire lay up against it; it was covered in nettles, the springs in the seat lolled out like spent jack-in-the-boxes, but it was so ridiculously exactly the same car it almost made him feel he was walking into a set-up. The video, then, would have been shot from inside that window. He inched a little closer.
The curtains were drawn and he had to get very close to see through the crack. The light from the TV
