glasses, his clown mouth seemed to be smiling and Caffery had to tell himself that Ndizeye wasn't aiming that comment at him. As Peach lay down on the dentist's chair, staring at the ceiling, his hands resting at his sides while the nurse velcroed a bib around his neck, Caffery found an aluminium chair and sat with his back to the window, sucking Altoid mints, watching in silence while Ndizeye worked.
'I'll get an impression first, and then we'll get bite-wing X-rays and an orthopantogram.' Ndizeye circled his hand around his head. 'A look at the whole lot. OK?'
Alek nodded. He hadn't spoken a word since they had arrived. His face was red, as if fevered, but he patiently allowed Ndizeye to try the stainless-steel impression trays for size. 'Right.' Ndizeye rinsed the last, largest tray. 'That's a U14 so I think we'll go for three scoops. You're a big man, Mr. Peach.'
The nurse mixed the pale pink alginate with warm water, a smell of something like violets and warm plastic coming from the mixing bowl. Ndizeye folded the mixture into the upper impression tray. 'Right, let's just lift these lips up.' He caught Peach's lips on his fingers and carefully seated the tray, allowing bubbles to escape and the tray to settle neatly into the sulcus, the fissure between the cheek and the gum. 'And just keep still.' He began to time it, counting off the seconds on his wristwatch. 'Only takes a minute.'
But after only 30 seconds Peach rolled on to his side, his face sweating, groping for the tray, saliva spilling on to his lips. 'I'm going to…'
'Keep still,' Ndizeye tried to keep Peach upright, 'big breaths through the nose.'
'I'm going to puke He rolled himself off the chair and put his hands out, stumbling forward, the tray falling on the floor, his trainers slipping in the alginate.
Ndizeye leaned over and tapped the sink. 'Here, over here, not on the floor, please.'
'Here.' Caffery stood, grabbed his arm and jerked him towards the sink. 'In there.' Peach barely made it before a thin brown coffee-like fluid came up. He stood at the sink, his body heaving, mucus coming from his nose.
Ndizeye laughed. He pulled paper towels from a dispenser on the wall and wiped the sweat from his face. 'Don't worry it gets some people like that. I'll spray a little surface anaesthetic on the back of your mouth while we do the lower tray.'
'I don't think I'm well.' Peach clutched the sink and looked up, a rope of saliva depending from his bottom lip. His face was brilliant red, the veins around his eyes startling blue in contrast. 'I don't think '
'Here.' Caffery hooked him under the arm and helped him back to the chair. He pressed a mouthwash cup and a paper towel into his hand. 'Get yourself cleaned up.'
'I'm not well.'
'We can see that.'
'I think I'm going to wait till you feel a bit better,' Ndizeye said, tearing another paper towel and going over to the sink. 'Yes. We'll wait till you feel better.'
Peach's eyes were closed. He rolled his head slowly from side to side, having trouble finding a comfortable position for it. He patted his mouth with the towel and sipped the water, then folded his hands across his chest, his hands tucked lightly under his armpits.
'OK?'
He nodded weakly.
'Feeling better?'
'I think so.'
Ndizeye wiped the sides of the sink and ran the tap to clear it. He paused, looking dubiously at the brown fluid in the sink. 'Mr. Peach? How's your stomach? Have you got pain?'
Peach nodded. His eyes were small in the bright face.
'Do you mind if I feel your abdomen?'
Peach didn't speak as Ndizeye gently pressed it. Caffery could see that the skin was taut, the stomach rigid, like a drum.
'What is it?'
'Do you take ibuprofen, Mr. Peach?' Ndizeye leaned near to his face. 'Do you take any anti- inflammatories?'
He shook his head again, groaning softly, his eyes flickering. Ndizeye reached for Peach's hands. 'Hot,' he said. 'Right.' He kneed a button on the base of the chair and the platform reclined flat. 'I think we should get someone up here to have a look at you.'
One of the photos of the 'outstanding suspects' on the wall of the paedophile unit on the third floor of Scotland Yard showed a woman in half profile, from the waist up, sitting next to a red curtain. An overweight brunette, she was wearing a black bra and her flesh was so dimpled that in the harsh overhead light she looked as if she had taken a dose of grapeshot across her belly.
No one knew her name. The photograph was a still taken from a video the unit had discovered in the early nineties. The film had been scoured and put through the usual enhancement processes, but apart from two cans of John Smith and an empty glass on the bedside table, the only identifying sign was the distinctive tattoo. A heart behind prison bars. The enhancement unit at Denmark Hill froze and blew up a frame where the woman had leaned sufficiently close to the camera for both the tattoo and her face to be in shot, and the photo had been there on the wall ever since Paulina had joined the unit 'I'm so used to these faces now,' she had once told Souness, 'that if I walked past one of them in Waitrose I probably wouldn't even notice.'
When she came up to AMIT's offices that evening the woman on the video was the last thing on Paulina's mind. What she wanted to know was why Danni was in this foul mood. She walked around the incident room picking up papers, barking instructions, and already they were twenty minutes late for the table booked at Frederick 's. When Paulina saw she wasn't going to make Danni move any faster by sitting there and glaring, she wandered away into the SIO's room and sat in Caffery's empty chair, head bent over as she used her index finger to push back the cuticles on her nails, lazily swivelling the chair round and round.
Souness found her there twenty minutes later. 'I'm sorry, baby.' She stood behind the chair and leaned over to kiss the top of her head. 'I'm sorry.'
Paulina looked up. 'You want to cancel, don't you?'
'Our chief suspect's just been taken back into Intensive Care. I'll take you at the weekend how about that?'
'Oh.' She shrugged. 'I don't suppose we'll get another reservation till next week. But whatever…'
Souness didn't reflect that she'd got away unusually lightly. She didn't know that Paulina would have taken it a lot worse had she not become quite intrigued in the time she'd been left alone in the office quite fascinated, in fact by an unusual little doodle she'd seen on Jack Caffery's desk.
Twenty-two.
(25 July)
The darkroom, the little cupboard in his bedroom, was ready, and now he closed the door, sealed it with tape, switched on the red lightbulb, and got himself comfortable: seated on a stool, the canister inside the bag on his knees, the book propped open on the enlarger easel in front of him.
The photograph in the book showed a woman's hand using a specialized tool for removing the top of the canister Klare's coins hadn't stretched that far, 'but you could use a bottle-opener,' the shop assistant had said, eyeing him suspiciously. 'A bottle-opener will do the trick.' And the assistant had been right -the bottle-opener worked perfectly, snapping the lid off in one, and now the film was ready to be transferred into the little plastic developing tank.
Klare withdrew the bottle-opener from the bag, dropped it on the floor, wetted his thumb and turned the pages to the next section. Tongue between his teeth, slightly hunched over the book, he followed the instructions minutely, cutting the film leader then, with his right hand, introducing the developing tank into the bag. He replaced the rubber bands on the jacket sleeves, opened the tank and finally, after a lot of fumbling, fed the film on to the spindle in the centre. He pressed the button to let the spindle take up the film, closed the tank, one on top after
