'Go on, then.' He handed her the ice-cream, picked up the shopping and they got into the lift, Bela clutching his arm for support. 'I'm yours for as long as you want me Annahid's gone to the cinema with her daddy.' When the doors closed she took a handkerchief from her gold-chained handbag and mopped the back of her neck, plunged it into her sweater and dabbed her armpits, her cleavage. She smiled at
Caffery. 'Sorry, darling, just need to make myself presentable.'
Souness met them at the lift doors. She was worried by Caffery's drawn face. 'Are ye all right, Jack?' she whispered, as they led Bela into the SIO's room. 'Ye look like ye're going to throw up.'
'Yeah. I'll tell you later.' He took the ice-cream through to Kryotos then joined Souness in the SIO's room. Settled now, all attention on her, Mrs. Nersessian was in her element. She reached inside one of her bags and found a long packet of Dottato figs and two packets of Garibaldi biscuits.
'Good figs.' She peered at them, pressing a varnished nail into the soft flesh. 'Yes, perfect. The fig is the poor man's food, Mr. Caffery, full of calcium, good for your bowels too you have clean bowels you have a clean mind, you can think straight. And you are going to need that, straight thinking, I hardly need remind you here.' She spread the biscuits across the desk, smiling encouragingly at Caffery. 'Come on, now what's the matter with you that you're so thin? Your wife doesn't feed you?'
'Mrs. Nersessian '
'Call me Bela, darling. I might be a mother but I'm not an old woman yet, and you, darling,' she leaned over and rested a hand on Souness's wrist, 'darling, call me a busybody but has your husband ever mentioned your weight? Not that I think there's anything wrong with it, some men like something to hold on to, don't they '
'Bela,' Caffery interrupted, 'we'd like to talk about Alek.'
'Ah, yes!' She turned to him, gold jewellery jingling. 'Now there's another one needs to eat a bit more -you should see him. All he does all day is walk all day long wandering around the park. Poor man, poor man, what that family's had to endure.' She pressed her hands together in a gesture of supplication and rolled her eyes to the ceiling. 'God protect us all from what they've had to live through.' She dropped her hands and leaned over the food on the desk, scooping a plump fig into her mouth and chewing for a long time, smiling at Caffery over moving teeth. 'Course, if I was the police I'd have let them down a bit easier than you did. I'd have broken it to them more gentle. I'm not criticizing you, of course.'
'Bela, let's talk about Carmel. How's Carmel?'
'Your man's been round, talking to her, but she just stares at the wall.'
'We heard. Does she speak to you?'
'Only to Annahid.' She pressed another fig into her mouth, and bent over, her face close to the fruit, inspecting them for the next candidate. 'Cries a bit with Annahid, but maybe that's good.'
Souness shifted in her seat. 'Bela, about Alek, he hasn't worked for a while, has he?'
She looked up as if Souness had suddenly leaned over and slapped her. 'The man's grieving? She stared at her, her mouth open. 'He hasn't time to worry about work -he's just lost his son.'
'I think the Chief Inspector means before '
'Before? Oh…' She patted the top of her lip where a line of sweat had started. 'Oh, that. Well, he used to have a disco, see, a mobile disco, and, oh, he loves his records and America he loves America, dreams he's going to live there, reckons he looks like Presley with all that black hair of his. The biggest dream of his life was to take Rory to Graceland. Of course, you can understand all the fuss, you can understand why the family never approved of him marrying Carmel in the first place, but I never held anything against him. Nor Carmel.' She waggled a box of Garibaldi biscuits under Caffery's nose. 'Come on, darling. Make me happy.'
Thank you.' He took a biscuit, the last thing he wanted, and rested it on the rim of his coffee mug. 'You were saying, about Alek's work, his disco…'
'I'm not saying he was the hardest working man, and then there was all that trouble, which makes it more difficult for him, but let's not go into that -they're not a traditional family, see, her being an odar, not that I'm saying I hold that against him.'
'I'm sorry, you said an oh-dah?
'An odar. A foreigner not one of us.'
'One of you?'
'Not an Armenian.'
'But Alek Peach is}'
'Oh, yes.' She blinked. 'Not a traditional one, of course, but he is one. Oh, I know, I know…' She touched Caffery's arm with her long gold nails. 'He's got blue eyes lots of us have got blue eyes, just like you, darling. Everyone thinks we're Iranian, but we're not. Look at me.' She pulled off her tortoiseshell glasses and blinked at him. 'See? See?'
'Yes, I see.'
'Blue, and what's interesting is…' She replaced her glasses. 'What's interesting is our great-grandfathers, mine and Alek's, they were best friends. Fought together against the Turks died together too. Our grandparents were sent to Paris and '
'But Peach- that's not an '
'An Armenian name? No. Of course not. That's what I'm saying he's not traditional, he's ashamed of his heritage is what I think.'
'He changed his name?' Caffery could feel Souness's eyes on him, could feel her interest spiking out into the room. 'Anglicized it?'
'Only his second name. Not Alek, of course, he kept that because it didn't sound '
'And his real name? What was Alek's real name?' 'Oh, you won't be able to pronounce it.' She flipped out one jewelled hand dismissively. 'If you can't manage Nersessian you certainly won't be able to do
Pechickjian.'
When Caffery left Tracey Lamb on the A134 she had no choice but to walk the mile or so home. Like a cunt in me drawers. It was a pale blue day and the distant finger of steam from the sugar factory in Bury St. Edmunds was visible above the trees. Few cars passed, the tarmac was hot under her bare feet, and she passed only one phone box, a little brindled dog sniffing around it. But even if she had 20p to call a cab she didn't have any cash at home to pay the cabbie. Since Carl's death things at the house had got bad. There were only four cartons of Silk Cut left, the Datsun was low on petrol and the dole cheque couldn't even begin to cover everything. And now, it seemed, the Bill were on to her.
Tracey had no one to ask about DI Caffery's visit -the person she would usually have turned to was gone now, her brother Carl. She and Carl had clung together for the thirty years after their parents' deaths in a way that some called unhealthy. They had so many things in common 'Even got the same teeth capped.' Carl would grin and pull up his front lip for anyone who would listen. He'd lost his in Belmarsh, and Tracey, well, he had to admit he'd taken hers out for her one St. Patrick's Day. Carl had lots of 'friends'. Tracey knew all about his 'friends' she'd met one or two of them when she'd done the videos.
She paused for a moment on the roadside, bent over and dragged brown phlegm out of her throat, spitting it into the ferns. A car went by and hooted loudly. In the back window she saw faces laughing at her. She put her hands on her knees, straightened painfully, and looked up the baking road to where it disappeared into a point on the hazy horizon. She couldn't let herself be fucked around like this when she got home she would find Carl's book and call his friends, ask them what to do next. She didn't like talking to them some of them were insane, even Carl admitted that. Some of them would do it with anything and anyone: 'Some of them'd do it with the exhaust pipe of an old Cortina,' Carl would laugh. 'It'd have to be a good-looking Cortina, of course.' But she had to do something.
She hobbled on in the heat, her feet hurting. Apart from the occasional passing car she hadn't seen anyone for over an hour, only a grey-haired old man in overalls, scavenging around the disused industrial poly-tunnels near West Farm. She turned off towards Barnham, past the derelict military houses, bricked-up windows and plywood on the doors, past an abandoned hangar. She was making slow progress -she had to stop every few minutes to catch her breath and bring up some phlegm. Tracey's lungs had never been right, not from the start.
'Nothing to do with the sixty a day, is it, Trace?' Carl would grin when she bent over her little polystyrene cup and hawked gobbets of phlegm into it. 'Nothing to do with that.'
'Fack off.' She'd give him the V-sign and Carl would laugh and they'd both go back to staring at the TV. She
