'What?'
'Can't you see it in my eyes? Can you see how well acquainted I am with death?'
'Hey.' Caffery moved his leg, not liking the vicelike grip. He could feel the blackened nails digging into his skin. 'Let go now.'
But the Walking Man wasn't listening. He dug in his nails harder. 'I see death everywhere I go. I am the rod that attracts death. I bring it to me. I saw it tonight — over there.' He nodded in the direction of the road beyond the field. 'I saw death tonight — I looked it in the eye before you came. I was that close. And from that I know it will be my constant companion.'
Caffery wrenched his foot free and stood above the Walking Man, breathing hard, staring at his face, at the wild hair, the night sky reflected in his eyes. 'What is this bullshit? What shite've you started spouting now?'
The Walking Man rolled back his head and laughed, as if he'd never heard anything so funny. He got on to his knees and pushed himself to his feet, laughing even harder. 'Goodnight,' he said, holding up a hand. 'Goodnight, PO-LICE-MAN. Have a good night.'
And he turned away, pulled his sleeping-bag out from a waterproof bag, and began to get ready for the night. Caffery watched him for a minute or two, then headed wearily back across the field to the car.
There was a light on in the Oscars' — in one of the windows Katherine Oscar liked to use when she was watching the Marleys. Flea noticed it the moment she opened the door to let PC Prody out. She noticed a shape there too — something that might have been the curtain slightly out of kilter, but might have been a person. She ran through the possibilities of what Katherine had seen: Thom coming through in the car maybe, Prody at the door. She thought about it for a few seconds and then, because she would never allow the Oscars to upset her again, she put it out of her mind and forced a smile at Prody. 'Goodbye,' she said calmly. 'Goodnight.'
She held the door for him, but he seemed reluctant to leave. He took a step on to the gravel drive and looked up at the stars. Then he took in the lawns sweeping down to the lake, the row of pollarded poplars lining the garden and the steps leading down. She waited for him to say it. To say that she'd done well for herself, a twenty-nine year-old on a sergeant's salary, done well to have a spread like this. But he didn't.
'I didn't hear about the hands,' he said instead. 'I admit. But I did hear about the other thing.'
'What?'
'The car-jacker. Last year.'
'Oh,' she said. 'That.'
'Yeah. That. And, for what it's worth, I thought you got a raw deal. I mean, you were only trying to help.'
'You like your gossip, do you? Over in Traffic?'
He leaned his head back a little and scratched the underside of his chin. 'You know what they said in Traffic? In Traffic, they said you were on your way to joining the suits.'
She looked at him stonily. 'Why would they say that?'
'Because around these parts CID have got their heads up their arses, and what they need is people who think outside the box. You know, laterally. People like you — thinking about the car that guy took and about why he took it.'
Flea stared at him, not answering. It took PC Prody a moment or two to see from her face that the conversation was over. He gave a shy smile, took his keys out of his pocket and half turned towards the car. Then something seemed to change his mind.
'Just one last thing,' he said. 'You had your reasons for running away from me — but you need to be careful along there, the A36. Been three RTAs last month — remember that little girl thrown through a windscreen? No seat-belt. Did the last twenty feet on her face.' He shrugged and looked up at the cottage, then down, past the cooling Ford Focus, to where the lake glinted silver and black. 'Yes,' he said. 'If you ask me she was lucky it killed her. Wouldn't want the parents to see her like that.'
He got into his cruiser, touched his forehead, a mock-salute, and started the engine.
Flea watched him pull away. When his headlights had faded it was just her, the night and the shadow of an owl swooping past the distant city, by turns blotting out the church spires, the abbey, the hills beyond. She felt a cool presence envelop her, starting in her middle and moving up to her head, wrapping her like a second skin. She kept still, knowing, without understanding how, that Mum was touching her, telling her it was all right. Kaiser could wait until the morning. For now, deal with Thom.
She let a few minutes go by, breathing slowly, until the presence had melted and passed away, and the night was just the night again. The owl swooped away into the trees and disappeared into silence. She turned to go back into the house, registering, but not caring, that the light in the Oscars' window had been switched off.
40
18 May
It was ten o'clock in the morning, very sunny, and Jack Caffery was thinking about redemption. Last night, after the Walking Man, he'd gone home and lain awake thinking about Craig Evans — crucified, strapped to an ironing-board — and about Penderecki, about the ache he still got knowing that the overweight old Polish guy had cheated justice twice — once by getting away with Ewan's murder and then by taking his own life. Caffery had found him hanging from a ceiling surrounded by flies, barbiturates and his own shit. The guy who'd killed Ewan had never been brought to the same balance Craig Evans had been. And now it was morning something else that the Walking Man had said came back to Caffery as he stood in the sun-blistered car park of the Mangotsfield community hall. Don't try to make me believe about redemption, he'd said. You must not try to make me believe in redemption.
He'd come back to those words today because he'd spent the morning finishing off interviews with the trustees of the remaining drugs charities and now he found himself at one of the last on the list of Mabuza's beneficiaries: Tommy Baines, the chief trustee of the User Friendly charity. He looked up at the church hall, the mullions and ornate cornicing work casting sharp shadows. The analysis of Mabuza's bank account linked with the list the Bag Man had given them showed that every one of the eighteen drugs groups BM had mentioned as a place Mossy might have gone was a beneficiary of Mabuza. Some got more money per annum, some less, but the South African had contact with all of them. But for some reason Caffery's head was twitching more about Baines's charity than any of the others.
He pushed open the front door and went into the cool, his footsteps muffled on the navy industrial cord carpet. 'Tig', Baines called himself. Caffery remembered that as well because it had irritated him, the nickname, and he found that when he thought about 'Tig' he got a feeling he couldn't put a finger on. He wondered if it was a kind of residual anger, a pissed-offness that Penderecki had got away with it, that people like him and Tig always seemed to get a second chance. And then he thought, as he rounded the corner to the office, even though it was petty, the one small thing he could do was to make life uncomfortable for 'Tig'.
'You again?' Baines said, looking up from the photocopier as Caffery entered the room. There were two older women in the office, in nondescript sludgy-coloured dresses, pottering around holding sheets of paper. Next to them Tig was a total contrast, standing in his vaguely aggressive way, wearing a Duke Nukem vest, camouflage trousers and Dr Martens. 'I've got a session at eleven and they start arriving before that so whatever it is make it quick.'
Caffery gave a small laugh. This was exactly the way he'd expected Tommy Baines to react. 'I'd like to talk to you,' he said, 'somewhere quiet.'
Tig looked over his shoulder at the two women. 'We can use the hall,' he said, jamming a palm on to the photocopier stop button. 'No one in there yet.'
They stood in front of a board covered with notices about Pilates, children's cooking courses and hall-hire tarif charts. Tig's arms were crossed tightly, like a bouncer's, a vein in one of his arms standing blue and hard-edged as if he'd been pumping just before Caffery had arrived. But Caffery was taller and he took advantage of that. He stood with his hands in his trouser pockets, his head forward a little, making sure Tig was aware that he had to bend a little to look into his face.