Wharf on his horizon for nearly an hour as he closed on London. He got to Soho for two fifteen, parked in one of the expensive local car parks, went into a branch of his bank and paid the three thousand straight back into his account, then walked calmly down to Shaftesbury Avenue.
Champ was only twenty-four but he already owned an electrical retail shop in the streets behind Chinatown. 'I do know which way is up, you see. I make it here with my Laotian name because nearly all my blood is Chinese.' He'd had acne at some point in the past, but his hair was neat and gelled, and he was well turned-out in a slate grey Armani suit and immaculate leather shoes. 'I get left alone as long as I'm quiet. I understand the guan chi see.' The boys sunbathing in Soho Square lifted their heads to watch him and Caffery walk by.
They went to a good, honest Italian in Dean Street: hand-painted Amalfi plates on the walls, bottles of Strega and Amaretto in a rack above the heads of the kitchen staff. Caffery had fish and sat with his back to the window watching Champ twisting up the spaghetti alle vongole. He leaned forward as he ate to avoid getting tomato sauce on his suit.
'When it happened they all came up out of nowhere, all the do-gooders trying to help me. I just kept quiet. I was working, you see.'
'Working?'
'When it happened. He was a punter.'
'A punter}' Caffery wondered if the PNC had made a mistake. 'But you were only '
'Almost twelve, and it wasn't my first.' He pushed some spaghetti into his mouth and pointed the fork at Caffery. 'You probably want me to say I was harmed by it, don't you? By the men? But some of them had more time for me than my own mother. I was in care for a year when I was two.' He chewed and swallowed. 'They found me in my cot with half a pound of shit in my nappy, me just lying there not moving or crying, even.' He twirled more pasta on his fork and pushed it into his mouth. 'She was, and still is, a slag, my mother.' Chewing, not taking his eyes off Caffery he reached inside his suit pocket and drew out a scrap of paper. 'Fished this out for you.' It was a crumpled, faded small ad. 'That's how he found me.'
I am an 18-year-old who had an accident which has left me looking only 10. Call…
Caffery pushed the paper back across the table. 'You were eleven and you were advertising?'
'I was a clever little Asian monkey even then. Our minds are quick, you know, skip through the gaps that GI Joe can't get through. Look where I am today -you know why? Because I never got a junk habit like everyone else. It was Mr. and Mrs. Bombita in those woods, believe me, businessman's specials meth, the lot. But me, I saved my money.' He waggled the fork at Caffery. 'Told you I'm mostly Chinese meat.'
'He asked you about your daddy.'
Champ snorted. 'Yeah. I'd forgotten that. That's the first thing he said, when he phoned, he asked me did
I like my daddy. I didn't get it at the time now I know it's just, y'know, normal gay talk.'
'And he took photographs of you?'
'I didn't show the camera my face, but what weirded me out was that I'm sure he took photos of me after I was down after I fainted. I remember the flash going off.' He mopped his plate with some bread and shrugged as if he hadn't given the incident much thought. 'Believe me, before that night I thought I knew what weird was some of them liked you to do such shit you wouldn't believe. There were the ones who liked yellow you know what that is, don't you?'
'Uh yeah.'
'And brown and fawn and red y'know, fisting. Hey, you're the police, nothing I can say is going to shock you, right?'
Caffery looked down at the fish on his plate. 'That's right.'
'But this was one sicko, weird from here to next week. First he's telling me he's going to watch over me. He said he would come and look down at me, that he'd like to watch me in my bed.'
'What do you think he was talking about?'
'No idea. Probably just his mad-speak and, anyway, he's fiddling around with me down there as he's saying it and I'm like, 'Hey hang on, you better put something on this is not bare backing times no more. You put something on.' But when I turned to check he hardly had nothing to put a rubber on anyway. Tiny, tiny little pecker like…' he held his thumb and finger apart'… like that. Never seen nothing like it -Midget Dick, the Angry Inch and he hadn't even got a hard-on. Couldn't get himself up. Course, turns out he had better ideas than that.' Champ forced the bread into the corner of his mouth. 'When he rammed that thing up my arse I fainted.'
Caffery put his hands on either side of his plate and looked down for a moment. His black nail looked purplish against the yellow check tablecloth. 'They never caught him.'
'Nope. He never did it again. Stopped just like that. And I never saw him again. I called him the troll, cos he was so big and so fucking ugly, man. I told the other boys I mean the meat-rack boys and the name just got handed down, like a legend. Later the other kids, you know, the straight little kids from the estates, they used to talk about the troll in the woods, play these games and run around and scream and work themselves up and shit.'
'We think we've got him.'
Champ didn't stop chewing. He scooped some tiny pieces of clam on to a piece of bread and pushed it into his mouth. 'I guessed that when you called. Who've you got?'
'I've got a photo. Do you think you'd remember him?'
'Yeah I'd remember him. Plain as day. Black hair he weren't a black guy, he was white but he had this black hair shiny' he held his hand up next to his head 'like mine. And he was huge I reckon about six and a half feet but he was young, you know. He can't have been more than sixteen.'
'Sixteen? You told the police in his twenties.'
'Well, yeah, I was only eleven he seemed really old. But I s'pose he can't have been all that much older than me.'
Caffery didn't speak for a while. He sat with his mouth slightly open, staring blankly at the cups resting on the cappuccino machine, a clean white napkin spread across them. Champ continued to chew, watching him. After a while he sat forward and said: 'Problem?'
Caffery closed his mouth and dropped his chin. 'No, no. No problem.' He pushed away his plate and felt under the table for his briefcase. 'I'll show you the picture then, if you think you'll remember.'
'I'll never forget him, the troll.' He leaned over, looked at Peach's photograph and shook his head. 'Nope. Not him.'
'You sure?'
'Sure I'm sure.' He put his fork down and patted his mouth with the napkin. 'Right dessert?'
'What's this fucking mess you've made?' Tracey Lamb was furious. While she'd been at the police station Steven had tried to get out of the caravan he'd thrown himself around, putting a long crack in one of the acrylic windows and upsetting his slop bucket. Now he sat on the bunk bed rocking himself, his head in his hands. 'I wasn't gone that long.' She splashed around some Dettol from under the sink, then grabbed his hand and pulled him to his feet. 'Was I eh, you little fuck? I wasn't gone that long.' She shook his arm roughly. 'So what the fuck's all this about?'
Traaaytheee His bottom lip stuck out. He looked as if he was going to cry.
'Oh, stop it, for fuck's sake.' She shoved a cloth in his hand and pulled him down on to his knees. 'There, wipe it up. Go on, clean it up, you filthy little shit.'
He started to move the cloth across the floor and Tracey dropped down on the bunk lighting a cigarette, watching him. On the way back from the police station she had been turning the problem of Steven over and over in her mind. When she was arrested her first thought had been that Caffery had set her up, that she'd been wrong about him, that he wasn't bent, wasn't working for someone. But during the questioning, as she calmed down and thought it through, she started to wonder if maybe she was mistaken. She sensed that Caffery was just as cautious of the dirty squad as she was. When he came down yesterday he'd been as nervous as a horse he had spent half the time looking over his shoulder as if he knew someone might turn up at any minute. He was cacking it. And during the arrest that morning he hadn't wanted to show himself he had taken one look at the area cars and melted away into the trees before any of the officers saw him. He hadn't expected it because, she decided, because he is as bent as you thought. And afterwards, outside the nick. What was that in his top pocket if it wasn't the gelt?
Kelly Alvarez had promised to tell Tracey how the unit had tracked her down. Maybe Scotland Yard had
