Caffery was six foot on the nose and the roof was too low for him: he had to bend his head slightly to stand. The attic was neat tea chests from some long-ago move, 'Rory/clothes' written on one, 'Kitchen' on another, rolls of orange insulating material and in the corner, where the shadows ran down from the walls, leaned a plastic Christmas tree and a Woolworth's bag full of red tinsel. Cobwebs strung across the ceiling clung to the lightbulb like a fairground ghost-train prop. He could feel the prickle of insulating material on his skin and that high, warm smell in his nostrils. Something was up here something that all the people who had come through the house had missed. He made a slow 360-degree turn, taking in every incongruity, and immediately he saw what he was looking for.
It was at the other end of the attic, right above Rory's bedroom: a small, indistinct pile of something, smeared like mud into the shadows, flies buzzing above it.
He picked his way across the joists, hand covering his mouth afraid of what you might find? He stopped half a yard away from the pile, waving away the flies. He was looking at a long, wet deposit of food half-eaten food slumped over polystyrene fast-food boxes, slimy hamburgers, a small pile of McDonald's cups, a pile of scrunched tissues. Off to one side a faecal mound, a tissue on top of it. And in the middle of it all a circle had been cleared in the insulating material, from the centre of which a single spiral of yellow electric light poked up into the room. When he went and stood above it he found he was looking through a hole straight down at a South Park duvet.
Someone had made a camp here someone had relaxed here, lived here, shat here, watched Rory from here, probably masturbated here. You fucker. He straightened up and looked around. Two yards away, leaning against next door's shared wall, was a piece of fibreboard. When he tried to move it he found it was light it came away easily and he pushed it to one side. He put one hand on the bare wall and leaned over to inspect what had been behind it.
Fucking hell you clever bastard.
Nine or ten breeze blocks had been removed. Bracing his feet on two joists Caffery rolled up his sleeve, and slowly, slowly, as if he was feeling for something sharp, he put his hand into the hole. In the silent, unblinking darkness of the neighbouring attic his disembodied hand clenched and unclenched, patted blindly up the walls. He retreated and pulled the torch from his waistband, leaning forward a little to shine it into the darkness, and found he was staring into an identical attic. This one was unused there was no bric-a-brac piled up and the only chink in the geometry was the access hatch outlined in light from the hall below and the sound of a television playing downstairs. He shone the torch against the far wall and saw what he was expecting: another piece of MDF propped against the far wall.
Someone had burrowed along the top of the houses until they could get to Rory Peach.
Quickly he switched off the torch, climbed down the ladder and went into the street, walking backwards into the middle of the road, hands in his pockets, head back, looking at the roofs. These were terraced houses, low- pitched roofs: none of the attic spaces was big enough to convert, and if someone had a mind to, and an understanding of the flesh and bones of a building, they could probably make their way from one end of the street to the other. If they could find a way into one of the other houses from the street
He stopped.
Two doors down from the Peaches was the boarded-up shell he and the TSG officer had searched on the first day. Shit yes. He reached in his pocket for his mobile, trying to find DS Fiona Quinn's number in the memory.
Twenty-eight.
A hyena, DS Quinn knew, leaves its footprints she had always known its tail had brushed the walls somewhere inside number thirty: she just hadn't known exactly where to look. This was a familiar problem for forensic investigators: without good witness statements to direct them they were walking blind they couldn't cover an entire house with fingerprint dust, they had to be told where to focus. But now, with this strange eyrie, all sorts of possibilities had opened up. She knew she could get mitochondrial DNA from the pile of faeces; she also believed there might be other body fluids up here saliva, blood or semen that could give her a full profile.
Now she moved carefully around the attic, dressed in the ghostly protective suit that shielded her from the UV light she was using. The equipment she'd brought was her bazooka the 'Scenescope': a combined long wave UV source and camera on a jointed wand, it could detect the smallest amount of body fluid.
Caffery remembered a time when these alternative light sources needed four men to carry them, remembered hearing how the technicians at the Brighton bombing sat in the corridor and used their feet to push the Scenescope's baby brother, the Crimescope, into the lift. Now the equipment arrived coolly in a tiny portable black box. But safety restrictions were still tight. The rest of the SSCU team had set up in the front bedroom, as far as possible from the light source, and sat with Caffery and Souness, crowded around the monitor, watching the screen, the only sound the big Scenescope fan whirring and the creak of joists as Quinn moved around overhead. The camera transmitted a distinctive blue circle to the monitor, a spotlight sliding along textured surfaces that looked like nothing more than skin under a microscope, until it slipped over a dab of something organic and a cold white flare raced down the wand to the screen and Quinn knew where to scrape for a sample.
'See that?' Caffery tapped the screen. 'That's the hole in the floor for him to watch Rory.'
'What the hell is going on?' Souness said softly. She had been called away from a charity gala in Victoria and was still dressed in a black silk suit and bow-tie. She'd grumbled about having to leave the event, but if Caffery had expected proof that she knew about Paulina and Lamb, if he'd expected tension in her voice, it wasn't there. She had driven over immediately, stopping on the way at Brixton station to pick up PC Palser the first attending officer who'd searched the attic. Now Palser was sitting awkwardly in the corner, staring at his hands, embarrassment written all over him. Souness was showing him her back, allowing him to stew a bit.
'And what's all this about our dentist friend?' she asked Caffery, unhooking her bow-tie and undoing the wing collar, letting it sit gaping around her neck. 'And Champ?'
'Peach's cast doesn't match either bite. Champ doesn't recognize him. He's absolutely one hundred per cent certain it's not him.'
'So what's going on with the DNA? Is there a mistake?'
'Quinny says they'll run it again, but…'
'But what?'
'I don't know.' He chewed the cuticle on his black thumb. 'I just don't know.'
They wanted to take PC Palser into the attic to get his version of events, so when Fiona Quinn had finished they all went on to the landing. She met them at the bottom of the ladder looking positive.
'We've got a lot. A lot.' She pulled off the lightweight TV-screen goggles and blinked: for the first time in forty minutes her view of the world wasn't via the cathode-ray tube. 'Jack, I promise you, I'll have got something out of this.'
'Can you get me anything in twelve hours?'
'Why? What's going on?' She unzipped the front of her suit the 'Area 51 radiation suit', she called it -and shrugged it down off her T-shirt. 'Someone's not telling me something the goalposts have moved.'
'You can say that again.' He drew his hand down over his chin, feeling the incipient stubble there. 'If I told you what we're thinking you wouldn't believe me.'
'You want the lab to rerun the DNA test?'
'Yes.'
'Will do.' She turned to PC Palser and gave him a sympathetic look. 'All right, son?'
'Yes,' he mumbled, not meeting her eye.
'Good. It's clear up there, so go ahead.'
Palser was silent as the three of them climbed up to the loft. It was only as he began to show them how he'd done the original search of the attic that he got his blood back. 'No one said it was food I was looking for,' he protested. 'I was looking for a kid. No one said nothing about food.'
'But this was all here when you searched the attic -all of this?'
'Yes. But I was in a hurry, I mean, I don't remember the…' He pointed, embarrassed. 'It didn't smell like this then.'
