Birdman

''Scuse me, mate.' Someone caught his arm. A sharp-faced man, shorter than Caffery, tanned, with pale blue eyes and a slim little unbroken nose. His yellow hair was slicked into a gleaming shield curved over his head. He wore a crisp, bottle-green suit, and was carrying two more in a dry cleaner's bag over his shoulder. 'You got somewhere I can hang these?'

Caffery found Maddox in the SIO's office, signing overtime forms. He threw the car keys on the desk.

'The Dog and Bell.'

'I'm sorry?'

'The Dog and Bell. It's a pub in east Greenwich.'

Maddox leaned back in his chair and looked at him carefully. 'Well?' He opened his hands. 'What are you thinking?'

'A Q and A. I'd want to look at any regulars with medical connections.'

'That'll get the press hopping. They won't stick to the moratorium if we open our mouths in public. I'll run it by the CS, but no.' He shook his head slowly. 'I think he'll say no. Not yet. You must've got other leads?'

'Names. A possible ID on victim three.'

'OK, so get Marilyn to divvy those up. What's the most promising one?'

'Joni Marsh. Working the Dog and Bell the day Craw disappeared.'

'Right, you take that tomorrow. But take someone else with you, for God's sake. You know how these women can be.' A knock on the door and Maddox sighed. 'Yeah? What?'

'Mel Diamond. DI Diamond, sir.'

'Come in, Mr Diamond. Come in.'

The yellow-haired officer came in, shucking his suit sleeves down so they covered his cuffs. 'Evening, sir.' He ignored Caffery and extended his tanned hand to Maddox, briefly flashing a micro-thin wristwatch. 'You won't know me, but I know you. From the Met boat club. Sir.'

Maddox paused a moment, his small face unresponsive.

'Chipstead,' Diamond prompted.

'Good Lord.' Maddox came out from behind the desk and shook his hand. 'Of course, of course. I know the face. So' — he leaned against the desk and folded his arms, looking Diamond up and down — 'so you're the lucky DI who's joining us. Welcome to Shrivemoor.'

'Thank you, sir.' His voice was fractionally too loud for the small office, as if he was used to being listened to. 'All the way from tranquil Eltham.'

'We'll be putting you straight in: you and your men on the knock tomorrow. Do a three-mile diameter. That OK with you?'

'It'll have to be OK, won't it? The governor wants us on routines, back-up to the real team.'

Maddox paused. 'Yes, there's not much,' he said carefully. 'Not much we can do about it, Mr Diamond. I'm sure you're aware of that.'

'Well, of course,' he said. 'Of course I'm aware. And I have absolutely no problem with it. No problem at all. If it's OK by the governor, it's OK by me — that doesn't need saying.' He nodded. Then, as if to draw a line under the issue, he smiled, waved a hand in the direction of the photos on the walls, and said, 'Nice boat. She yours?'

'Yes.' Maddox was hesitant.

'She's a Valiant.'

'Yes she is, indeed she is.'

'Good boats, Valiants. Some find them a bit tubby, but I like them. Marvellous cruisers too.'

'Yes, well.' Maddox was warming now. 'Hate to say it but the Americans usually come up trumps with cruisers. Mammoth indulgence, of course.'

'A cutter won the Met's Frostbite run this year.' Diamond's tongue moved inside his mouth. 'It wasn't by any chance…?'

'Yes.' Maddox nodded modestly. 'Yes, indeed.'

Standing against the wall, his arms folded tightly, Caffery was surprised to find himself irritated by this exchange. As if the benefit of Maddox's support and affability was his exclusive right, not something to be switched on a whim to another DI. Irrational though it was — he's not your father, Jack, you don't have any rights to him — he was angered to see Maddox this vulnerable to flattery, and when DI Diamond grinned, delighted — 'Good God, good God. Just wait till I tell my mates who I'm working with' — Caffery turned away and quietly left the room.

7

That evening Jack sat at his desk in Ewan's room, gazing at the Windows 98 clouds on the screen. The upper branches of the old beech at the foot of the garden cast shifting, coppery shadows on the wall above him. He didn't need to turn and look to know how the new leaves almost concealed the rusting nails, deep in the flesh of the tree, and the few mossy planks: the remains of the tree house which he and Ewan had crouched in as kids, shouting to the roaring trains in the cutting below.

Sometimes, in his solitariness, Jack strained to remember how it was, how he was. Before. He had an image of a child, lighter than a breath, nothing to stop him floating away over the roof tops into the blue air.

And then — that day. Recollected as a set of jerky scenes spliced carelessly together, slightly grainy, as if he'd cheated and taken the memories not from real life but from a spool of 8mm film tucked somewhere in the back of his parents' attic.

It was mid-September, windy and sunny, and the dried planks of the tree house creaked as the beech, still soft and green with summer sap, bowed in the wind. Jack and Ewan had clashed. They had found four floorboards in a skip; Ewan wanted to build a watch platform in the southernmost branches of the tree, so he could see the trains swaying down the line from Brockley station. Jack wanted the platform at the north end, so he could look off down the track at the misty bridges of New Cross, see the faces of the city workers as they travelled home with their London Evening News.

Jack — an exasperated eight-year-old on a short fuse — shoved his older brother hard against the tree trunk. Ewan's response was ferocious and startling: he recovered his balance, extended sturdy arms and bulldozered, screaming, into Jack. 'I'm telling, I'm telling.' Spittle flew from his mouth. 'I'm telling Dad.'

Jack was caught off balance, sent reeling to the edge of the tree house, coming to a halt half on, half off the deck, his shorts ripped by a nail, legs dangling, the thumb on his left hand trapped between two planks. Pain made him furious.

'Tell then, you bastard! Go on. Bloody tell.'

'I will.' Ewan settled into resentful guilt. His eyebrows closed together, his bottom lip pushed out. 'I hate you, you scally. Bloody, bloody, fucking scally.'

He turned and clambered down the rope ladder, his face closed in angry concentration, and dropped into the railway cutting. Swearing loudly, Jack freed his thumb, pulled himself back into the tree house and lay there, breathing slowly, his throbbing hand sandwiched between his bare knees, angry and exasperated.

Beneath the tree house, where the banks of the cutting flattened into a wide band of undergrowth, the brothers had created a network of paths for their games, each route meticulously explored, mapped, named: a trampled cobweb spiralling out in the bindweed. As Jack watched from the tree house, Ewan chose the southern path, the one dubbed the 'death trail' because it skirted by a rusting immersion heater — 'See that, Ewan? That's an unexploded bomb. A V2 probably.' His clean, dark head bobbed a few times above the undergrowth, the mustard T-shirt flashed. He reached the clearing they called camp 1, beyond which lay the DMZ, demilitarized zone, the lethal V2 and land of the Gooks.

Jack lost interest. Ewan sulked too easily. It tired him. Angry and in pain he slid down out of the tree and went inside to complain about the black-and yellow half-moon bursting under his thumbnail.

* * *

Afterwards it was the tree house which cut their mother more deeply than anything. Caffery could see her now, a thought or memory having halted her mid-oven cleaning or mid-washing up, to send her stiffly into the garden, where she would stand, staring at the tree, pink rubber gloves dripping suds into the grass. The last place she'd seen her son.