'He's not here.'
'You sure?'
'Yes.' He straightened and pulled off his jacket. 'He's off somewhere.' He handed Souness the jacket and began loosening his tie. 'With someone else, probably.'
'Oh, Christ Almighty.' She saw what he was going to do and turned hurriedly to the audience. 'If ye'd all just like to go inside. That's it.' She made shooing gestures at them, as if to sweep them all back into their flats. 'Come on now, nothing to see here.' Slowly, reluctantly, they closed their doors and she turned back. 'Jack,' she hissed, 'we don't even know if this is him.'
'We will soon.' He emptied his pockets, handing her his keys and some loose change.
'Oh, Jesus I hope you remember how to fill out a Prop Dam
'Remember?' He took a step back. 'I could do it in my sleep.' He rammed his foot into the door. 'Police!' His voice echoed around the small dank landing. Letterboxes opened slyly behind them. A second kick. The door shuddered, seemed for a moment to bow at the centre, but the two locks held.
'That bottom one's a deadbolt, Jack.'
'I know. POLICE!' He slammed out his foot, landing the kick perfectly along the line of the locks, jarring the tendons in his knee. The top Yale sprang out of its footing but the bottom one held. He hopped backwards, getting his balance. 'Fucking thing.'
'Och, look,' Souness said impatiently, patting her pockets for her mobile. 'You'll never hoof it down.
We need the ghost busters Jack. I'll give them a call.'
'OK, OK just give me a He stepped back, pushing his hair off his forehead, and landed the third kick where he wanted it, about four inches to the right of the locks. The thin outer skin of the door crumpled. The next kick went straight through. 'There.' He hopped back, dragging away long splinters of wood, and began ripping at the opening, breathing hard, dropping pieces of honeycombed interior on to the floor. He pushed his hand into the hole and patted along the inside, his face hard against the door. 'Good.' He looked at Souness. There was a thumb-turn at the back of the deadbolt. 'Got it.' The lock rotated easily. He and Souness were in.
Neither spoke. They stood, peering cautiously into the darkened hallway.
Souness took a deep breath. She pocketed her mobile, handed Caffery his jacket and keys, and stepped across the threshold. From somewhere inside, somewhere in the darkness, came a stale smell. She hesitated, felt in her pocket for the sturdy torch she'd bought. 'You sure he's not here?'
'I'm sure.' But his voice was low. Cautiously he flicked on the light and they both stood, looking into the hallway. It was an unremarkable, council-block hallway, ending a few feet ahead in a doorway. No carpet on the floor, the boards were bare. The walls were wood chip and on either side of the hallway were two painted doors. 'Hello?'
Silence.
'This is the police, Mr. Klare.'
Silence.
From the landing behind them came the creak of another letterbox opening. 'Nosy wee fuckers.' Souness closed the battered door with her foot and turned back to Caffery, who was standing at the first door, his hands up, palms facing the door, an odd softness in his expression as if there was warmth coming from it.
'Jack?'
He didn't answer. The hair on his arms prickled, standing straight up against his shirt. In biro, in tiny, almost invisible letters, someone had written very plainly the word Hazard.
He turned to Souness and smiled.
Outside it was getting dark. From the window in the living room they could see the weather rolling in for miles around clouds as big as cathedrals stalked above the park, pink evening light prismed up from the horizon. Souness put some calls in to mobilize the locals, to get a bulletin out to the area cars, to mount surveillance on the flat and to get the SSCU over to Arkaig Tower to see if they could pick up some DNA to match to their target. 'Right,' she said. 'Let's give the place a wee spin, then. Before the cavalry arrive.' They brought the lifts to the top floor, jammed them and propped open the door to the staircase if Roland Klare decided to come home between now and the time new officers arrived, they wanted to hear his footsteps on the stairs. They zoned the flat roughly between them: Souness wrapped polythene freezer bags around her hands and took the living room and bathroom while Caffery did the kitchen and the bedroom. They used lights only in the rooms that didn't have windows; in the others they relied on what daylight remained. Klare's flat, they soon found, was a warehouse: every imaginable object was hoarded here, from a collection of vacuum-cleaners to a tawny owl in a glass dome. Some areas were filthy the smell of the bathroom made Souness put her hand over her mouth and the fridge was full of rotting food: they could well imagine Klare was responsible for the mess in the Peaches' attic. But in erratic ways the flat had been kept scrupulously clean. The kitchen had been scrubbed: in some places the work top had been so manic ally scoured that small scoops of the Formica had worn through and showed chalky white. Cloths sat in a large boiling-pan on the hob. The floors, none of which had carpets, were obsessively clean.
With the first stone Souness turned she found something of interest. 'Hey, Jack,' she called, 'have a deek at this.'
He went into the living room and found her standing at a metal-framed desk, silhouetted against the sunset, staring into an opened drawer. 'What's that?'
'Fuck knows.' She picked it up and they both peered at it. It was a battered notebook, a rubber band around it. 'What d'you make o' that, then?'
He took her elbow and lifted it higher, tilting it towards the window so he could see better. The words 'The Treatment' had been carefully stencilled in a box on the front cover, and the curling pages were covered with detailed drills and formulae, all written in a tiny, hectic scrawl. Newspaper clippings had been pasted inside, articles on the Rory Peach case. Caffery's skin tingled. 'Grab it, then.'
'Right.' Souness slipped the notebook into a freezer bag, put it inside her jacket and turned back to the living room. 'Come on, snap-snap.'
They worked for another ten minutes, neither sure exactly what they were looking for. In a magazine rack Souness found a card picturing a toddler in a nappy with the caption: 'i HATE TO BOTHER YOU WITH A personal problem…' She opened it and read the punchline: 'but i'm horny.' In the bedroom, deflated and tucked into a drawer, Caffery found a blow-up doll of a male child, a tag in Japanese attached on the seam at the ankle. They were definitely in the right place, and it was all so weird, he thought, like an out-of-hours museum, all Klare's collection neatly ordered on fold-out tables metal, the sort you might see at a jumble sale. Caffery noticed that none of the collection touched the floor, everything rested on these tables it made him think about how Rory Peach had been stored, off the ground, the way a big cat would drag a carcass into a tree.
He was still wondering about this when, ten minutes later, he pushed open a cupboard door in the bedroom and found what he knew they were looking for. 'Hey, Danni,' he called, 'got a moment?'
'What?' She came in from the living room, puffing, holding her arms above her head and squeezing past the tables to get to him. 'What you got?'
'I don't know.' He reached inside and switched on the light.
'Red bulb,' Souness muttered, peering suspiciously into the cupboard. 'Freaky.'
'It's a darkroom.'
'Eh?'
'It's a darkroom look.' He pointed to a small plastic table covered in equipment: bottles of chemicals, a pair of rubber gloves, trays, a lamphouse mounted on a stand that he guessed was for printing film. Set aside from the clutter, at the far end of the table, was a biscuit tin, sealed with brown tape. 'Darkroom equipment.' He reached in his pocket for his Army knife, slit the tape on the tin, popped the lid off and looked at what was inside. 'Oh, shit.'
'What?'
'Here we go.' He handed the torch to Souness and started pulling out prints. 'Photos.'
'What?'
'Look.'
Souness came into the cupboard and shone the torch onto the photos. Human faces stared up at her. 'Oh, God,' she said, tipping back a bit on her heels. The images were blurred but she thought she knew what she was looking at. She recognized the cross-hatched lino on the floor. 'Rory Peach?'
