Rebecca pushed herself off the radiator and dropped onto the stair next to him, chest heaving, sweat-stained hair stuck to her face, her forehead. The dress was still hiked up to her waist, plastered against her skin, baring the shadowy notch of her navel.
'I'm sorry. I shouldn't've done that—'
'No — it's—' She wiped her mouth and looked sideways at him, her face and neck flushed and sore. 'Really — I— it's OK. I could've stopped you.'
'I should've used something. I've never done that before. I don't usually—'
Suddenly she covered her eyes, shook her head and started laughing.
'What?' His leg, he saw now, was bleeding — a long, inky trail extended into the trousers bunched at his ankles. 'What's funny?'
'Is that what you meant? A human failure?' She opened her fingers and peered out at him, still smiling. 'Is that what drove Veronica mad?'
'Oh Jesus,' he muttered. 'I told you — it's never happened before. I mean it.'
'Can you prove it?'
'Yes. I can prove it.'
'What — right now?'
'Right now.'
'No seriously — right now? I mean, are you sure, can you really?'
'Yes—' He looked around for something to wipe the floor, his shoes, his leg. 'Yes, I can. It's one of my party pieces.'
'God.' Rebecca sighed, dropping her hands from her face and smiling. 'This could be love.'
At eleven he was ready.
In the bedroom Joni was lying very still. He thought she was still unconscious until he approached and saw her one good eye staring up at him, taking in his scrubs, his mask, his cap. It was only when he produced the scalpel that she responded, bucking on the bed, back arching, head snapping from side to side, little noises coming from her throat.
'Calm down.' He put a soft, reassuring hand on her shoulder and pressed her down into the mattress. 'Calmly does it.'
Joni wrenched her head back and snarled at him from behind the gag.
'Bitch,' he said softly and straddled her. 'Shut up now, bitch. I've been good with you, but you're pushing me.' He shoved her down onto the bed and Joni became very still under his hands, watching him warily with her good eye.
'Good.' He tipped back on his heels and wiped the sweat from his face. 'Now, listen. I'm not going to kill you.' He bent over and, ignoring the shudder that went through her body, gently rested his face against her neck. 'I only want it to be like it was that night. Do you understand me?'
He could tell from the single tear that trickled from her cheek onto his forehead that she had accepted that. She stopped struggling. But to be quite certain he double taped her torso to the bed, crossing the tape over her hips; he knew from the Greenwich woman that even unconscious the human body responds violently to pain.
He reached for the styptic pencil.
'This won't take long.'
Tongue between his teeth, he painstakingly drew a mark just above the old scar where the new incision would be. Joni dragged in desperate shallow breaths through her nose as he spat on the scalpel and wiped it across his tunic.
'Not much to cut through under here, Joni.' He grimaced and the soft flesh bloomed up over the blade like cheese, strained, then relented and split long, like a heavy fruit. A muffled keening sound came from the tape mask. Joni's pelvis jerked frantically against the mattress. There was just a thin smatter of blood scattered amongst the freckles on her belly, nothing much. Bliss bent down to squint up into the new wound. Past the bloody, yellow fat he could see the implants squinting at him from their envelope of meat.
'Lucky,' he breathed and patted Joni's knee. 'They've been put above the muscle. Just hold on one moment…' He bit his lip and slowly inserted his fingers into the hole, creeping it around inside the breast.
Joni's good eye widened as his index finger hooked around the silicon bag. Her head thrashed side to side.
'Quiet now. Don't twist.' His thumb and forefinger closed on the sack. Confident now, he tugged it. 'Easy. Easy.' Joni's feet scissored, thigh muscles taut as small drums, as the implant slipped out drawing an egg-cupful of fluid with it.
He gently placed it on her stomach.
'There we are. Easy, wasn't it?' He wiped his hands on his scrubs. 'Now let's see. One down, one to go.'
47
Suddenly, without warning, the summer turned its back on England and settled complacently over the Iberian peninsula. Rain came to London yet again. When Caffery woke, Rebecca asleep next to him, he could smell the change in the air, feel the humidity on his skin. He lay there for a moment, his heart speeding, sensations rushing at him, trying to decide what had woken him. Something in the flat? Joni returning? Or just a dream? He listened hard to the silence for a while, until his heart steadied. Rebecca lay on her side, her right arm flung out over the edge of the bed, her left curled up so the hand was lightly touching the shoulder as if posed for a classical sculpture. Her face was turned from him. He raised himself on his elbows to look at her. She was very still. Still and—
Jesus, Jack, don't do that.
He almost laughed. For a moment he'd imagined she was dead. But her small rib cage rose and fell, and when he put his face very close to her breast he could hear the reassuring almost inaudible whistle of the air in her lungs, the avian fluttering of her heart.
A dying bird.
He sat up abruptly, got out of bed, went into the kitchen and put his face under the tap. He didn't want to think about Birdman, about what he'd done. Not when Rebecca was sleeping next to him.
He straightened, dripping, the image fading. Joni wasn't back — last night, before he'd taken Rebecca to bed, he had put the chain on the front door — Joni would have had to wake him to get into the flat. Now he put the kettle on, poured a glass of water and drank it quickly, staring at the photographs on the mantelpiece above the freezer.
Some of the pictures showed Rebecca: dressed in paint-splattered dungarees, paintbrush in hand; or bleary eyed on a rumpled pillow, hand held out in protest to the lens; another was taken on a pebbled beach, Rebecca in shorts, tongue out, cross-eyed under an outsize floppy hat.
He rested the glass on the ledge and picked up a snap of Joni. She was prettier here than he remembered, probably because she didn't appear stoned. She was clear-eyed, staring into the lens, a cigarette in one hand, her mouth open in mid-sentence, a finger extended towards the cameraman as if trying to explain something important, to make a point. Her hair was cut bluntly so that it fell to the shoulders, a low fringe skimmed her brows.
Caffery took the photograph to the table and sat, his elbows on either side of it. Joni stared back at him, trying to make that point. He ran his finger across the fringe.
The scars on the victims' heads were a perfect circle; from back to front. Kayleigh Hatch's and Susan Lister's white-blond hair had been cut in a fringe. Caffery traced his hand across his own forehead. On the victims the marks were outside the hairline, below it on the forehead. That was not the natural place a wig would sit. It was too low.
Unless—
Unless it had a fringe. Like Joni.
He jolted to his feet — his heart hammering.
Not Joni now but Joni then — before she had the hair cut. Before, Jesus, of course, before she had the implants. It's the old Joni he wants.
'Becky?' He kissed her neck. 'Becky. Wake up.'
Rebecca stirred and woke.