Birdman

'Very bleached, white-blond hair, yeah?' Joni held up a chunk of her own hair. She was sober now, clear-headed. 'Like mine. And a Bugs Bunny tattoo, here?'

'That's right.'

'That's Kayleigh.'

'Kayleigh?'

'Yeah, Kayleigh Hatch. She's a, you know—' She mimed an injection to the inner elbow. 'A serious user.'

'Address?'

'Dunno. She lives with her mum, I think. West London.'

Caffery noted the name. He was seated now, against the wall, on a small wooden bench near the easel. When Rebecca had brought more beers from the kitchen she had pulled a chair up and sat less than two feet away from him — bent forward, her slim arms folded loosely on her knees. Innocent: but Jack found her closeness unnerving.

He looked across at Joni.

'Something else.'

'Yeah?'

'You worked with Shellene Craw last week.'

'Uh huh. I did.'

'Think back — did she leave with anyone on that day? Did anyone come to collect her?'

'Uh—' Joni licked her lips and stared at her tangerine-painted toenails peeping out from her cork-heeled sandals.

'Hello?'

'Yes, I'm thinking.' She looked up. 'Becks?'

Rebecca shrugged but he caught the ghost of the look Joni had given her. It was gone in a second, like a burst soap bubble, leaving him to wonder if he'd imagined it.

'No,' Rebecca said. 'She didn't leave with anyone.'

'You were there?'

'I was painting.' She indicated the sketches on the trestle table.

'OK. I want—'

He stopped. Off guard for a moment, he had noticed how goosebumps had raised on Rebecca's legs. This sudden, close, microscopic sense of her skin put him off track and she caught the change. She dropped her eyes to where he was looking, understood, and raised her eyes to his.

'Yes?' she said slowly. 'What else do you want from us? What else can we do?'

Caffery straightened his tie — she's a witness, for Christ's sake.

'I need someone to identify Petra Spacek.'

'I can't do it,' Joni said simply. 'I'd puke.'

'Rebecca?' His will stretched out to her. 'Will you do it?'

After a moment she closed her mouth and nodded silently.

'Thank you.' He swallowed the remainder of his beer. 'And you're absolutely certain you didn't see Shellene Craw leave the pub with anyone?'

'No. We'd tell you if we had.'

* * *

They walked back to the car. Essex looked drained.

'You OK?'

'Yes,' he croaked, clutching his chest and grinning. 'I'll get over it. I'll get over it. Do you think they're gay?'

'You'd love that, wouldn't you?'

'No seriously, do you reckon?'

'They had separate bedrooms.' He looked at Essex's face and wanted to laugh. 'They weren't real, you know.'

Essex stopped with his hand on the car door. 'What'you talking about?'

'Joni. Silicone. They weren't real.'

Essex put his elbows on the car roof and stared at him. 'And what makes you such an expert?'

He smiled. 'Experience? Three decades of changing shapes in Men Only? I can just tell. Can't you?'

'No.' Essex was open-mouthed. 'No. Since you ask. No, I couldn't tell.' He climbed huffily into the car and put his seatbelt on. They'd driven a short way when he turned to Caffery again. 'You sure?'

'Sure I'm sure.'

Essex sighed wearily and looked out of the window. 'What is the world coming to?'

* * *

It was still light when Caffery got home, and he found Veronica on a recliner on the patio, sullen and silent, watching the shadows lengthen in the garden. She wore an apricot mohair cardigan draped around her shoulders and there was a half-empty bottle of Muscadet next to the recliner.

'Evening,' he said lightly. He wanted to ask her what she was doing in his house again, but the stiff angle of her head warned him she'd like to draw him into an argument. He passed and went to the end of the garden, linking his hands into the wire fence, facing away from her.

From across the railway cutting a thin plume of smoke rose into the pink sky. Caffery pressed his face against the wire. Penderecki.

Sometimes, in the evenings, Caffery would watch Penderecki in his garden, moving around, smoking and absently scratching between his buttocks like an old gorilla preparing for sleep. The garden was little more than a patch of grey earth between the house and the railway cutting, scattered with old engines, a fridge and a rusting axle from a trailer. The land on that side of the cutting had once been a brick field and gardeners in the row of Fifties houses still turned up half London Stocks on their hoes.

Hard soil to dig. Caffery didn't think Ewan was buried there.

Penderecki, his back to Caffery, wore his customary nicotine-brown vest. One hand rested on a rake — next to him the battered incinerator coughed smoke into the air. Seventeen years ago Penderecki had discovered Caffery's habit of collecting things, going through his rubbish, taking everything that might provide clues about Ewan. And this had become rituaclass="underline" burning his household refuse, and, to ensure that Caffery knew about it, doing it in plain view, in the back garden.

As Caffery watched, Penderecki cleared his throat, hawked out phlegm onto the earth and became perfectly still, one hand on the incinerator lid, responding with his acute sensitivity to Jack's presence. The knowing pose, the womanly hips, the grey hair slicked down over a bright pink scalp; Caffery felt the stirrings of ancient anger unravelling from him, as if Penderecki could reel it in across the hundred yards of evening air which separated them.

Penderecki turned slowly to face him and smiled.

Blood rushed to Caffery's face. He pushed himself away from the fence, angry at being caught, and strode back down the garden.

From the patio Veronica regarded him steadily.

'What?' He stopped. 'What are you staring at?'

In reply she breathed out loudly through her nose and half closed her eyes.

'What? What is it?'

She sighed heavily.

Caffery opened his hands. 'What?'

And then he remembered. The tests.

'Jesus.' He shook his head, deflated. 'I'm sorry. You've heard?'

'Yes.'

'And?'

'Oh, I'm afraid it's back. The Hodgkin's is back.' The eyes narrowed, her face twisted, but no tears came.

Caffery stood quite still, staring at her. This was it, then.

'Dr Cavendish called. The fact is I have to start the chemo again.' She tightened the cardigan around her shoulders. 'But, look, we're not going to make a fuss about it. OK?'

Caffery dropped his head and stared blindly at the concrete. 'I'm sorry.'

'Don't be sorry.' She reached over and patted him on the hand. 'It's not your fault.'

'We'll cancel the party,' he said.

'No! No, I won't have anyone feeling sorry for me. We're not cancelling the party.'

9

By the time the morning meeting started Caffery had spoken to Virgo, an east London agency who represented 22-year-old Kayleigh Hatch, stripper, sometime prostitute, full-time drugs user. They remembered the Bugs Bunny tattoo and when Caffery heard that the last gig Kayleigh had done had been at the Dog and Bell he asked Virgo to courier over a photograph.

He taped it to the whiteboard next to the shots of Petra Spacek, Shellene Craw and Michelle Wilcox.

'This pub's our starting point.' He rested his elbows on the desk and looked at the assembled investigating teams. 'We've got surveillance on it as of this a.m. but the DCS has made it clear that before we go in mob-handed he wants IDs on the victims. So today we're working on that.' He nodded at the new photo. 'Now — Hatch. At last a name. I think this is victim number four we're looking at. And the only one, if you think back to the PM protocol, who didn't have the wounds to the head. Other than that, she fits the pattern: drugs use, prostitution. And, like the others, she wasn't raped. If she had intercourse it was consensual, a condom was used.' He paused, allowing that to sink in. 'Hatch's mother put her on the missing persons two weeks ago. She's over in Brentford so, Essex, you might like to make that an action for this morning. But notice that the only other person reported missing was Wilcox. All the others were suspiciously easy to spirit away, weren't they? Think about that when you're on the knock. Now, Logan.' He addressed the exhibits officer. 'How's that DNA coming along?'