missed him, God love him. I miss you, Carl.
By the time she got to the little track that cut across farmland, along the top of the disused quarry, and on to the garage, her feet were bleeding. The garage was a long way from the road, but she kept going, limping now. Every now and then a military jet from Honnington would blast its way across the sky, splitting the air open, disappearing in seconds into the horizon, but otherwise the countryside around her was quiet, quiet and very still in the sun. She knew it so well now, these fields, that fence, that path. Carl had been renting the garage and the house since their parents died when he was nineteen and Tracey was thirteen. She understood his business. She understood all about the pile of smashed car windows, the stolen chassis stamps and the dodgy MOT embosser. There was always a stripped-down car up on blocks in the garage, a pile of moody number plates in the kitchen and a Transit van or an old Ford parked under a tarp out the back Carl would let her have a peek then drop the tarp and put his fingers to his mouth: 'Never say nothing about this car, all right, girl? Just pretend you ain't seen it.' Every now and then a car would come in that needed vale ting 'Urgent valet job': Carl would jump like a whippet at those words and would work all night on some anonymous Discovery or Bronco, the electric lights in the garage blazing out across the countryside. And he collected people, too, the same way he collected scrap metal: they'd come and go, day and night, through the little breeze block house, carrying car stereos and carrier-bags full of duty-frees. Tracey had grown up with the sound of Harleys zooming up and down the driveway. There was always someone around, someone sleeping in the bath, someone curled up in a grubby sleeping-bag in the garage, an ever-changing string of boys who came and went, helping Carl with the re sprays (and other things too, she was sure of that). The Borstal boys, she called them, because they always seemed to be on the run from the borstal. 'And that's something else to stay schtum about, Trace, all right?' Everyone in
Carl's circle had done time at some point or another -and that included the 'biter' that DI Caffery had been asking about.
'He was a weird one, him,' said Carl. 'Always reckoned women were dirty. You should have seen him, he had to put on rubber gloves before he touched any of the boys in case they'd been near a woman.' He lived in Brixton and although DI Caffery hadn't said where the little boy had been bitten, Tracey had a suspicion it might have been on the shoulders. But in any case her predator instinct told her that actually it wasn't the 'biter' Caffery was most interested in at all in his questions about him she sensed a cover of some sort and it was only when he began asking about Penderecki's boy that she thought he was getting to what really interested him.
Penderecki's boy. Although Tracey knew what the shifty old Polack had done to the child, she had never been told who the boy was, neither his name nor where he'd come from. But, from the way Carl had built a mile-high wall of silence around the subject, she had always guessed it was because the boy meant something to someone important. She guessed there was money in it somewhere. And maybe, she thought, that was why Caffery was so interested.
She stopped. She wasn't far now. She could see the sun glinting off Carl's abandoned vehicles on the edge of the quarry: an old Triumph, a moss-covered caravan, a picked-clean Ford. Only another ten minutes to the garage, but she stood quite still, the pain in her feet forgotten, hardly registering the clutch of pheasants that rose screeching from the trees. Something was emerging from the dank, unexercised walls of Tracey Lamb's brain. Something about DI Caffery. Maybe, she thought, maybe he wasn't the beginning of her problems after all. Maybe he was the solution.
Roland Klare had spent the morning making notes, considering short-cuts, finding new ways of looking at it, and had finally worked out what he needed: a few sheets of print paper, a litre can of fixer, and some Kodak D76 powder. The photography book was clear: it warned him that he might damage the film if he didn't use a professional safelight, but he had decided to take the gamble anyway and added a twenty-five-watt red lightbulb to his list. He had turned out his pockets and drawers and old cider bottles full of coins, and had got together thirty pounds, all of which he put into a dustbin liner, twisted up and slung over his shoulder.
It was heavy, all that change, and it took him a long time to get to the bus stop. On the bus the other passengers gave him strange looks, sitting at the back with the dustbin liner squat at his feet. But Klare was used to people moving seats to get away from him, and today he sat quietly, his eyes wandering patiently around in his head, until the bus reached Balham.
He got off just outside the photographer's shop, the shop whose dustbins he routinely purged, and before he even thought of going into the front he slipped up the road and around the back. He put down the bag of coins, pulled over an old crate and stood on it, up on tiptoe so he could peer down into the big dumpster. His heart sank. It had been emptied recently. There was nothing in there except an old cardboard Jaffa oranges box. He climbed down off the crate, wiping his hands, resigned now, picked up the bag full of coins and trudged round to the front of the shop.
Twenty-one.
Neither Caffery nor Souness could believe what the computer was telling them. They sat for a long time, chairs a few feet apart, staring at the screen in silence. They had gone into the Police National Computer and come back with a CRO number a criminal records office number for Alek Pechickjian. Indecent assault on a minor. Sentenced in 1984 to two years.
'No.' Caffery shook his head. 'Nah I can't believe it. Just because he's got a record, doesn't mean '
'For indecent assault? Of a minor?'
'Jesus Jesus.' He put his head in his hands, his mind racing. The first of Peach's of fences was pre-1985 and not back-record converted they had e-mailed the records office for the microfiche to be couriered down but Peach's second offence, a nominal term for a pub brawl in which a seventeen-year-old's eye had been popped out, had started at the end of 1989, shortly after the assault on Champ and the Half Moon Lane hoax. Caffery stared at the screen in disbelief. All the odd loose ends in Peach's account of the events at number thirty Donegal Crescent his denial of photographs being taken, his denial that he'd heard Rory at all in those few days, the fact that his wife and son were dehydrated and he wasn't all the drifting question marks seemed to be settling silently around Caffery.
He got up and took the photo fit of Champ's attacker from the file. Then he took all the crime-scene photographs and spread them out on the desk. 'What do you think?'
Souness leaned over the photo fit and shook her head. 'I dunno. What do you think?'
'I don't know either.' He turned it one way then the other. 'Could be, could be.' He picked up the crime-scene photos. 'That thump he took on the back of the head, d'you think he could have…' They both leaned forward and looked at the mark that Alek Pechickjian, Alek Peach, had left.
'If he manacled that end first…' Souness pointed to the photo. 'And then the hands ye know, Jack, he could actually've done it…'
'No, no, no. Hang on.' Caffery pushed his chair back. They had asked Bela Nersessian to leave for a moment and she was in the incident room with Kryotos; he could see her red hair bobbing up and down, as if she'd like to get a look through the window. He leaned closer to Souness and lowered his voice. 'No, look. What are we saying? That he ran out the back when the shopkeeper knocked on the door? Climbed up that tree, dumped Rory, got back to the house and tied himself up all before the police could
His voice trailed away Souness was nodding. The shopkeeper had gone all the way back to his shop to raise the alarm and in that period Peach had had more than enough time. Quite enough to make it look as if he'd been attacked. Caffery and Souness had both heard of this sort of scene staging the manic writing on the wall, that was a popular one. And they had both seen enough to know that people can, if they put their minds to it, push themselves into unimaginable positions, inflict unimaginable injury on themselves. Caffery was thinking not only of auto erotic deaths -sad souls wrapped in tent bags, in rubber masks, faces obscured by used underwear, manacled on pulleys to the ceiling but of others which could have so easily been mistaken for murder: he had once seen a suicide who had pulled out his own intestines and snipped them into pieces with sewing scissors, another who had set fire to herself in the locked boot of a car. He knew too well how murder can masquerade as suicide and how suicide can masquerade as murder.
' 'Do you like your daddy…?' he said quietly.
'Eh?'
